Archive: Ed Robb: Orchestrating an Evangelical Renaissance

By Sara L. Anderson

A preacher once said that if the Apostle Peter were alive today, he would be a redneck, wear a cowboy hat, drive a pick-up truck with a gun rack in the back window—and he would have voted for George Wallace for President.

That’s probably not far from some critics’ impressions of UM evangelist and activist Edmund Whetstone Robb, Jr. While the accuracy of that description is highly questionable, it is nearly as hard to be neutral about Ed Robb as it is to stay impartial during a Dallas Cowboys-Washington Redskins football game.

Some remember Ed fondly as the thundering evangelist under whose preaching they came to Christ, others see him as the Ralph Nader of the UMC, pointing out the structural defects of the church. Yet, for someone who has never been elected to a General Conference, Ed has left a lasting impression on United Methodism. His credits include pastoring growing churches, traveling around the world as a fulltime evangelist and helping establish A Foundation for Theological Education (AFTE), The Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) and the Mission Society for United Methodists, not to mention an early Good News connection.

Dr. Steve Harper, who worked with the Ed Robb Evangelistic Association as a student evangelist, determined upon meeting Robb in 1966, “He was a man who had vision, and who had the kind of energy necessary to bring others into that vision.”

But controversy has often nipped at the heels of the products of Ed’s vision, especially when church criticism and reform were involved. Robb’s most recent endeavor, a book written with his daughter, Julia, will be no exception. The Betrayal of the Church, subtitled, “Apostasy and Renewal in the Mainline Denominations,” (see sidebar) deals with political influences of the religious left on mainline churches. It is an extension of an old controversy surrounding the founding of the IRD in 1981 and the resulting probes of the National and World Councils of Churches.

Ed’s high-profile involvement with these issues began in 1980 when UM layman David Jessup, an AFL-CIO employee, began researching the recipients of United Methodist agency funds. In a report prepared for General Conference, Jessup noted that $442,000 in United Methodist funds had been distributed to radical groups openly or tacitly supporting causes such as the Palestine Liberation Organization, the governments of pro-Soviet countries such as Cuba and Vietnam and violence-prone fringe groups.

What became known as “The Jessup Report” led to the passing of a resolution on agency financial accountability. When concerned clergy and laity of other denominations became disturbed by similar situations in their churches, the IRD came into existence. The IRD’s criticism of the NCC’s and WCC’s funding of leftist causes led to major probes by the Reader’s Digest and CBS’s “60 Minutes,” on which Ed was interviewed.

Quoted in the Jan. 1983 Reader’s Digest article, Robb said, “The NCC has substituted revolution for religion. I believe that Christians have an obligation to work for social justice. But there will be no justice without freedom.”

Comments like that attracted a barrage of barbs. The IRD and Ed, directly or by association, were accused of promulgating “McCarthyism,” being “self-selected” critics accountable to no one, promoting anti-social justice stands and manufacturing “an arsenal of vague, damaging accusations.”

Then-president of the NCC, former United Methodist Bishop James Armstrong, refused at one point to debate Robb on the issues, saying he would not be part of a “cheap-shot dialogue,” and was quoted in a United Methodist agency news release in a veiled reference to Ed, “I wish the biased critics who are gaining a hearing at the expense of their own church and the ecumenical movement would take more seriously such commonplace words as ‘ethics’ and ‘fairness.’” Christian Century Editor James Wall editorialized, the “The IRD strategy … is to support a Reagan foreign policy.”

“The church ought to be above partisan politics,” Ed countered. “[It should] speak out prophetically on clear moral issues, but not be identified with a particular ideology.” Robb stressed that the IRD did not want to see churches withdraw from the NCC. “We want in. We want to be part of the decision-making process,” he said at the time. “But we don’t think the answer to the suffering of the world is the totalitarian left.”

Still, the poison darts kept flying—as they had in his past identification with reform movements. The criticism stung. “He was working for reform, preaching for reform, writing for reform, and nobody seemed to want it,” Harper observes. Ed admits, “It’s sometimes psychologically disastrous to live in that kind of atmosphere where people accuse you of being disloyal to the church and question your motives.”

To those who have supported him through the years, Ed Robb’s motivation was never a question mark. “I have never known Ed to level a criticism against the United Methodist Church which was not coming out of a heart of deep love and deep pain,” Harper says. “Ed has tried to reform United Methodism into the image he believes John Wesley intended it to have.”

Indeed, Robb is deeply rooted in the Wesleyan tradition. His Whetstone ancestors in North Carolina found Christ through the preaching of circuit rider Francis Asbury and they produced several generations of Methodist preachers.

As a 19-year-old Navy signalman on liberty, Ed attended San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Methodist Church. One Sunday during a missions conference, the preacher, Dr. J.C. McPheeters, asked those who wanted to surrender their lives to Christ to stand. At that moment the six-foot sailor from Marshall, Texas, who had avoided total commitment to God, understood real liberty.

“I walked out of church with my buddy, another sailor, and I took a package of cigarettes out of my pocket and threw them across the street,” Ed recalls. “The guy with me said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m going to preach the Gospel.’ And I’ve never turned back.”

Three months later Ed preached his first sermon in his home church, Summit Street Methodist Church. The place was packed with locals waiting to see this miracle that had come to pass. “I’d been a rather rebellious young man,” Ed recalls with a chuckle. After delivering a 12-minute sermon on “halfhearted Christians,” the novice stepped back as the pastor gave an invitation. Ed remembers, “Most of the people in the church came forward to recommit their lives.” That became a common occurrence.

While Ed studied at East Texas Baptist and Centenary Colleges, he continued to preach, and his direct, evangelistic style drew people to the altar. Church membership expanded like bread dough leavened with fast-rising yeast. In his first, small country church, Robb saw 75 new members brought into fellowship. While pastoring a church in Amarillo, Texas, the membership increased from 285 to 610—in three years and four months. History repeated itself in Midland, where membership doubled (to 1,200) and the budget tripled during Ed’s tenure.

After more than seven years as a conference evangelist (1966-1974), traveling around the globe, Robb asked for another church. St. Luke’s in Lubbock boasted 1,600 members, but morale was low. “In two years and eight months, I received 865 new members into the church,” Ed notes. “We had 15 people go into the ministry. The budget went up 300 percent.”

Ed’s evangelistic preaching and tireless tenacity, not unusual programs, were major factors in church expansion. St. Luke’s, for example, would average 100 visitors on Sunday. Robb saw them all that week if they had not been visited before. “I would always have a prayer with them,” he says. “I would try to give a witness where required.”

And when Ed recites these membership statistics, it is more with a spirit of awe than pride. “He inspires confidence,” says Dr. Kenneth Kinghorn, a compatriot in United Methodist renewal. “He’s not seeking to glorify himself. Therefore people can line up in an enterprise with him knowing that he is not primarily concerned with himself. The task at hand is what is important to him.”

Dr. Albert Outler, the highly respected Wesley scholar and professor emeritus at Perkins School of Theology, discovered something similar, albeit in an unusual way.

In 1975 Ed delivered a controversial speech at the Good News annual convocation on the state of theological education. In the address, which he still considers one of his best, Robb charged, “Our denomination is suffering from weak, ineffective ministerial leadership. If we have a sick church, it is largely because we have sick seminaries.” And, stirring up the biggest wasps’ nest, he concluded, “I know of no United Methodist seminary where the historic Wesleyan Biblical perspective is presented seriously, even as an option.”

Thinking back on the event, Dr. Outler wrote in a 1980 issue of The Christian Century, “My own indignation was especially ‘righteous’ since I was deeply involved, with others, in a protracted, earnest crusade to recover and re-present John Wesley as a significant theologian and as a fruitful resource for contemporary ecumenical theology. My response was less than conciliatory; after all, what was there to expect but another salvo in reply?”

To Outler’s surprise, Ed responded by showing up at his office. “Instead of wanting to argue the point, he wanted to know what could be done about the situation,” Outler recalls.

Outler convinced Robb that few evangelicals were teaching in United Methodist seminaries because few had appropriate academic credentials. They decided to try to influence and equip scholars who were distinctly Wesleyan and evangelical who could be added to the faculties of United Methodist schools.

So A Foundation for Theological Education was born. So far, 47 scholars have participated in the program and their doctorates have been financed to the tune of $8,500 a year each. (Steve Harper was the first scholar and is now professor of prayer and spiritual formation at Asbury Seminary.) It keeps Ed, the major fund raiser, under constant financial pressure, but he feels it’s worth the stretching. “We are seeing some of our scholars placed in UM institutions. Others are writing significant books and we have reason to believe that several are going to be added to UM faculties in the future,” he says. Yearly Christmas conferences for the scholars, called John Wesley Fellows, have attracted the deans of UM schools like St. Paul, Claremont, Emory, Wesley, Boston and Duke.

Serendipitous products of AFTE were the deep friendship and productive working relationship between Outler and Robb. Outler believes it is a positive sign that the conservatives and moderates can work together effectively within the church.

While all this was going on, Ed, of course, was keeping up his schedule of church and city-wide crusades; publishing his ministry’s newsletter, Challenge to Evangelism Today; visiting his small farm with wife Martha; keeping tabs on his five children and four grandchildren; and working on the book. But last summer he found out the hard way his need to shift into a lower gear and to reassess his priorities.

Twice Ed was hospitalized for strokes and twice he underwent surgery to clear blocked arteries in his neck. “I’ve seldom felt as close to the Lord. It was a unique and precious experience,” he says. “It made me realize anew and in a rather dramatic way how mortal I was.”

Ed’s activism and accomplishments have given him a high profile in the United Methodist Church. His name is recognized—with respect or rancor—more readily than those of most bishops. But, how would he like to be remembered? “As an evangelist. There’s no higher calling than to preach the Gospel and introduce people to Jesus Christ,” he says without hesitation. But he adds, “I would hope that what we’re doing through AFTE would have significance 100 years from now in the direction of the United Methodist Church.”

United Methodists of tomorrow may not remember and revere the name of Ed Robb, but if children recall their grandparents’ stories of conversion under the preaching of a Texas evangelist and seminary students are infected by the zeal of professors who were John Wesley Fellows, Ed’s vision will be fulfilled.

Sara L. Anderson is the associate editor of Good News